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Transformers Titans Return: Throttle and Breakaway by Hasbro

I’ve got time to get in just one more Transformers Thursday before 2016 wraps up and it just so happens I’m right in the middle of my look at Wave 3 of the Titans Return Deluxes. I’ve already checked out Hot Rod and Twinferno, now it’s time to look at the one that I was really looking forward to. The figure that I knew was going to be amazing before I got him in hand. That’s right, it’s… Breakaway? Really? This guy? Nah, of course not. I’m being roboto-sarcastic. This figure is the quick-and-dirty repaint that Hasbro snuck in to help cost out the wave.

If you haven’t guessed by the packaged shot, Breakaway is a straight repaint of Chromedome. He’s also an homage to the G1 Powermaster, Getaway, and the Titan Master, Throttle, is an homage to Getaway’s little engine buddy, Rev. Hey, if Hasbro’s going to give us a repaint, at least they did it trying to deliver us another updated G1 toy. Let’s start with his alt mode.

Yup, it’s a white Chromedome. The car design is definitely not a close match for G1 Getaway, unless you’re grading it on the most abstract of scales and count it having four wheels and, well… also being a car. With that having been said, Hasbro tried to match the deco is best they could. You get the red and blue stripes on the sides of the hood and again on the blue panels in front of the rear wheel wells. The red tinted windows and yellow stripe above the windshield is a nice touch too.

On the downside, it loses points for not having a spoiler, especially when you consider one could have been added by a relatively simple remold. I also think that the front grill and headlights are desperately in need of some more paintwork. It’s honestly not a bad looking car, but if I didn’t already know it, I’d be hard pressed to identify this guy as an update to Getaway.

Throttle is a simple enough little bot. As expected, there’s no paint on him, but I will give him credit for not being all one color. In this case, his body is white and his arms, legs, and head are blue. I think it’s odd that they didn’t try to color match Rev, but matching the colors between Titan Master and robot seems to be the order of the day here. As you probably guessed, Throttle does not turn into an engine, but he can sit in the driver compartment of the car and the fact that he’s got a lot of blue in him means that he doesn’t blend in with the same colored plastic interior like a lot of these little guys do.

Breakaway comes with the exact same weapons as Chromedome, this time cast in blue plastic. The toy allows for several different ways to attach the weapons to the car, one of which provides a gunning station on the roof.

Obviously, Breakaway transforms exactly the same as Chromedome and here’s where this toy starts to lose me a little. It feels a bit too much like a throwback to the engineering we saw on some of the Combiner Wars Stunticons. Sure, I loved those toys, but this is a new line with a new direction and after getting so many repaints and remolds of those figures, I’m not crazy about seeing it reproduced here again so soon. And yes, these are all issues I had with Chromedome too. Still, if you can get past the deja vous, the robot mode isn’t bad at all. He looks particularly good from the back because everything packs away very cleanly.

The new deco does its best to differentiate Breakaway from Chromedome. You get paint apps that serve to accentuate this and diminish that. I will say that I was surprised by how good the white plastic looks and feels. I was expecting it to be the cheap stuff Hasbro sometimes uses, but it’s quite good, as is the quality of all the paint applications. The deco, however, doesn’t do that great a job of matching Getaway. The arms aren’t blue, and you don’t have the red on the lower legs. Obviously, the chest is not made up of the roof of the car either, but the deco does feature some red and yellow paint to make it look like a heavily morphed version of the windshield.

The head is a decent enough sculpt, but thanks to the “gray” helmet, the colors don’t match Getaway like they should. Also, while I’m used to seeing mouth plates, Breakaway is really just lacking a face altogether. He’s just got eyes and a big blank under them. It’s kind of creepy.

We already saw that the weapons are the same as Chromedomes. That’s a good thing, because I really like this gun mold.

Cards on the table: If it weren’t for the fact that I bought the whole wave in one go, I wouldn’t have bothered picking up Breakaway at all. Now that I have him, I have to admit that I like him a whole lot more than I thought I would. He will not be going into the dreaded Tote of Unwanted Repaints and instead, I have him displayed with the rest of my Titans Return figures and looking pretty sharp. Yes, the homage to Getaway is quite a stretch, but then Getaway was a figure that I didn’t even remember existed until I consulted some photos of him for this review. Besides, now Rewind can have that Menage-a-Trois he always dreamed about… and film it too!